Cactus Heart - [5]

We walked maybe twenty feet and made a sharp turn. Here the passage opened into a slightly larger room where four other Phoenix cops were clustered. Part of the wall had collapsed and I could see, in a flashlight beam, some debris beyond.

We approached silently. The opening in the wall was small, just big enough to hand through a nineteen-inch TV set. The bricks had fallen in, exposing a cavity inside the wall. On the other side were some wooden framing and more old brick. The cops shone their lights and we peered in. It was a small skull, human looking, along with more bones, all a yellowish color, collapsed into a heap. There was some unidentifiable fabric or maybe leather. Then I saw another small skull.

For a long time nobody said anything. We stooped in silence and stared through the hole in the wall, as if we expected the flashlight beams to re-animate the dead.

“Look at that, off to the side,” Lindsey said.

“Don’t touch anything!” It was a patrolman who looked like a young Jack Kerouac.

“Oh, okay,” she said sweetly, her sarcasm lost on a roomful of cops. She plucked away Jack Kerouac’s flashlight and focused it on an object that looked a little larger and thicker than a silver dollar. It was metal, tarnished and brass-colored under a coating of dust. My eyes were getting too bad to make out the design on its head.

“Pocket watch,” Peralta said. “See, there’s the watch chain off in the dust. Looks like some initials on the cover, but I can’t make ’em out.”

“It looks like a large Y and a small H,” Lindsey said. I could hear the scratching of a cop’s pen on a notepad and a memory compartment rattled open in my head.

“Y-H?”

“No,” I said, absent-mindedly standing up straight, nearly cracking my head on the low ceiling. “It’s H-Y. It was a cattle brand.”

Everybody was looking at me now, the passage thick with cologne and dust.

“Hayden Yarnell,” I said. “The cattle baron.”

Cop faces stared at me impatiently.

I nodded toward the bones. “These must be the Yarnell twins. His grandsons. They were kidnapped back in the Depression and never found.”

Lindsey whispered what we were all thinking: “Oh my God.”

3

Hayden Winthrop Yarnell burst into Arizona history on an April day in 1889, the year my grandmother was born. That day, at a desolate one-shack siding on the Southern Pacific Railroad grandly called Gila City, a gang of robbers attacked a train as it took on water. They wanted the express car, which they heard was carrying payroll strongboxes bound for the mines at Bisbee. The gold was there, all right, but so was Hayden Yarnell with two Colt Peacemaker revolvers.

A photo of him taken two months later shows a clean-shaven man with delicate lips and a long, strong nose, looking uncomfortable and stern in a high collar, string tie and suit coat. But something behind his eyes burned with the obstinate clarity of the pioneer-that’s the way I’ve always pictured him at Gila City.

The leader of the outlaws, a murderer and rustler named Three-Fingers McMackin, shot a deputy in the face and strode to the door of the express car. When Three-Fingers slid the door open, Yarnell put a.45 caliber bullet between his eyes. Another desperado nearly severed Yarnell’s left arm with a rifle shot, but the young guard managed to get back in the express car and close the door. For the next half-hour, the outlaws emptied their pistols and rifles into the car as Yarnell clung to the floor by the payroll boxes. But they didn’t have the guts to try to open the door again, so they rode away empty handed.

This wasn’t the last Arizona would hear of Hayden Yarnell. With reward money from the train robbery, he talked his way into becoming a partner in the Copper Queen mine, the legendary dig that for a time made Bisbee, Arizona, the most important city between St. Louis and San Francisco. Five years later, Yarnell cashed out a rich man, not yet thirty years old. By that time he also owned three saloons in Brewery Gulch, Bisbee’s notorious pleasure district, and was a director of the town’s biggest bank. Every history of Bisbee in the 1890s had a Hayden Yarnell story or two: about the day he faced down a gang of outlaws trying to rob the Goldwater-Castenada Department Store, his marathon poker games that would go for days, the orphanage he quietly bankrolled.

With the Apache subdued and the coming of the railroad, a young Anglo with vision and money could build many an empire. Yarnell chose cattle, one of the touchstones of the West. His first ranch, Rancho del Cielo, spread two thousand acres across the high southern Arizona grasslands around Tombstone. Eventually, he had more than a hundred thousand head of cattle scattered across ranches and pastureland from the Mexican border into the Arizona high country two hundred miles north. And every one of them bore the distinctive brand of his initials-the large Y, the small h-looking just as we found them engraved on the pocket watch beside two small skeletons.

I was telling this story over breakfast at one of my favorite morning spots, an unassuming little eatery on Glendale Avenue called Susan’s. It had recently been called Linda’s. Such are the comings and goings in the Valley of the Sun. Peralta sat across from me, occasionally nodding as he munched on a giant skillet breakfast, picked through that morning’s